2016 Facebook Presidential Primary Update: Engagement and Gain

Now that the Presidential candidate field has expanded to 20 with Donald Trump pretending to be a legitimate candidate, I thought I'd look at how their Facebook pages have progressed.  I looked at how they have gained followers and how the level of engagement relates to the number of followers.  Rand Paul had the highest gain in followers (those who click like on the page) at 78,429 followed closely by Ben Caron at 74,383.  Rand Paul is now the first in either party to surpass 2 million total followers.  Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton far out-gained the Democratic field with gains of 52,423 and 32,263 followers respectively.  Though Lincoln Chafee announced his candidacy this week, he has not set up an official page.  George Pataki was a surprise announcement and there is no gain score for him.  In the table at the bottom, all of the candidates pages are linked to the names in the table below.  The numbers on the links may differ from the numbers in the table so you can track how their numbers change since this posting.

The level of engagement (called "people who are talking about this" on the Facebook page) is the number of people who have either clicked on a post from the page, clicked like on a post from the page, commented on a page post, or shared a post with their Facebook page.
Rand Paul again leads the Republican field with 281,904 engaged (probably due to his opposition to the Patriot Act).  In the Democratic field, Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders 164,721 to 136,722 in this category.

The engagement rate is a measure of the level of enthusiasm by page followers.  It is simply the number engaged divided by the total followers.  George Pataki leads all candidates in this category with 29% followed by Bernie Sanders at 26%, Martin O'Malley at 22% and surprisingly Carly Fiorina at 21%.  Pataki,O'Malley and Fiorina have a relatively small number of followers at 15,391, 70,748 and 60,165 respectively.

Comparing the candidates across parties,  As can be seen in the table immediately below, the Republicans have more followers per candidate but the Democrats (and socialist Bernie Sanders) had a higher average gain in followers and a higher rate of engagement on their pages. 

	Republican	N	Mean	Std. Deviation
Presidential followers June	Yes	15	660330.60	692891.882
	No	5	465180.40	405045.637
Gain in Followers, June	Yes	14	15144.07	26227.543
	No	5	19565.60	22157.034
Engagement Rate, June	Yes	15	10.15%	7.309%
	No	5	15.74%	9.865%

		Candidate	Presidential followers June	Gain in Followers, June	Level of engagement June	Engagement Rate, June
Republican	No	Hillary Clinton	871449	32263	164721	.19
		Bernie Sanders	530262	52423	136772	.26
		Martin O'Malley	70478	4764	15535	.22
		Lincoln Chafee	.	.	.	.
		Joe Biden	831968	8122	8998	.01
		Jim Webb	21745	256	2366	.11
	Yes	Ted Cruz	1249160	4762	134836	.11
		Mike Huckabee	1743599	9519	231343	.13
		Rick Santorum	261168	1982	17289	.07
		Ben Carson	1487589	74383	168658	.11
		Rand Paul	2001304	78429	281904	.14
		Lindsey Graham	111795	3914	10982	.10
		Jeb Bush	178172	1888	4681	.03
		Scott Walker	283102	4901	24483	.09
		Marco Rubio	874898	13893	83916	.10
		Chris Christie	104785	619	3014	.03
		Rick Perry	1183094	8979	40992	.03
		Bobby Jindal	243034	3504	5174	.02
		Carly Fiorina	60165	4765	12713	.21
		John Kasich	107703	479	7320	.07
		George Pataki	15,391		4,512	29

**Update**

Just when I thought I had the Presidential field covered, Donald Trump decides to join in.  Well here are his Facebook page's numbers.  He has 1,792,016 followers, and 113,658 new followers in the last week, 53,880 engaged with his page.  Dividing 53,880 by 1,792,016 gives an engagement rate of .03 or 3% which places him even with Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and Chris Christie among Republicans.

**Related posts**

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Santorum's "Bounce"